Chapter VIII: Criteria & Validity. (Wiggins & McTighe , 2005)

As we have been studying the book “Understanding by Design” by the authors mentioned above, we have been realizing, step by step, the different elements and key concepts that undoubtedly have become really important to our own awareness of evaluation and assessment.
In this chapter called “Criteria and Validity”, the authors discuss and give lots of tips about how we as teachers have to be aware of the importance of different types of assessment, specifically the ones which are not based just in correct or incorrect answers (objective tests), but the ones which the evaluation is guided by an appropriate criteria. This brings the question that at the moment of having evaluations based on students’ performances, in what criteria do teachers support these evaluations? This is a huge subject because is not that easy for an assessor to test and assess according to what he thinks is correct or not. The things is that in order to assess students’ understanding is central to have criteria and formulate rubrics for its further assessment. By rubrics we mean a set of instructions where an assessor relies on and supports the evaluation. At the same time, rubrics describe degrees of quality, proficiency or understanding along a continuum (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). According to the authors there exist two general types of rubrics: holistic and analytic. The holistic one is intended to evaluate a general view of a task, in opposition to the analytical one which is based on particular areas or “traits” that gives different scores in different areas.
Having these issues in mind is important to clarify something. As a matter of fact, having rubrics for assessing students’ performance become fundamental in the way that teachers should be as clear as possible at the moment to explain students the way they are going to be evaluated. This sounds common sense but one thing is to have clear rubrics based on any standard criteria to evaluate and the other is to not inform students by what rubric they will be evaluated in the future.
At the moment of having a rubric of evaluation, we need to think that it is important to have support and reliability. As we have already seen in the previous chapter the need for having fair judgment from evidences founded from the assessment, general judgment is central to the purpose of being accurate at the moment of giving marks. Rubrics are grounded by validity as well. If validity measures what is supposed to measure, rubrics depend also on the criteria of what is supposed to be focus on at the moment of judging if students did well or not in a particular area. And this brings the concept of reliability as the confidence the assessor should have in the rubrics guided by credible patterns and clear trends (2005).
Finally, it is fundamental that teachers should be really aware of all these issues at the moment of assessing and judging students’ works or performances. It becomes essential that evaluative processes take into consideration not only the theoretical part of the assessment but the interest and ongoing learning from students.

Wiggins, P., McTighe, J. Understanding by Design. Chapter VIII. 2005.